Thomas greanias atlant.., p.16
Lords of the Shadows, page 16
part #4 of Raven Series
For two days she labored in the mine-shaft, hacking at the rock wall with greater and greater desperation, clawing the small crystals of mabion out of the solid matrix that had birthed them when the mountain flowed into its present shape. Stripped naked against the heat, she felt the dust of the mine build up on her body so that her limbs and face became blackened and hidden behind an armour of rock that made her seem as one with the rock.
Each crystal she removed she placed on the pile, and by hour and day the pile grew higher.
Each “night” she returned to the overhang, ate hungrily of the rancid meat of the bird-things that Spellbinder caught, and then curled into the warlock’s arms, too weary to do anything but sleep. All of them had lost track of how the days and nights advanced outside the forge.
Soon the weight of the ore was sufficient for the making of a single mabion blade. Raven tied the crystals into her cloak and carried this sack out into the great cavern, the weight of it hurting the raw flesh of her fingers. Exhausted then, she went to stand where a cold stream trickled down the walls, from some mountain brook that had found a channel through the rock. She scrubbed the dirt and dust from her face and body, then called Spellbinder to help her rinse the grime from her hair. As her hair hung saturated about her shoulders, heavy with water, but shinier than for two days, Spellbinder ran his hands hungrily across her body, warming her and easing her with his touch.
She kissed him fiercely, pressing her nakedness against the cool leather of his clothing, then she led him to one of the tunnels, where he laid down his cloak on the rocky ground and pressed her upon it.
Alone she went back to the Eternal Fires, to the covered place there, a rotted wooden lodge inside of which were scattered the tools of a forge. This lodge was crouched against the wall of the cavern, some distance from the great pile of glowing rocks that were the fire stones of the forge. In its gloomy interior Raven felt cool, sheltered, and wondered at the hands and minds that had worked here in the ages gone past. Now, however, there was scant time for reflection, and she prepared the place for the shaping of the sword, tidying the tools, and studying them all in the lodge. The anvil was huge, its surface pitted in places, and dented in others. The point of it gleamed and the softer curves of its sides were still smooth to the touch. Raven searched among the debris of wood and stone and found the hammer, an iron-gripped thing with a wide head, weighted so that it fell heavily when she released it; when she struck it against the anvil it rang loud and shrill, and bounced up again in her hands.
She blackened and oiled her face and arms, covering her body with cotton garments, and wrapping bandaging about her wrists and neck. Her hair she tied back into a bun and covered her head with a scarf cut from Parwya’s garment, a strange material that would preserve her the longer from the heat.
Then she hauled her cloak-sack of ore towards the Eternal Fires.
The glowing rocks blasted her with heat and ash, and the wind blowing through it from the tunnels moaned and roared in her ears; each time the great mass was heated she turned her face to hide her eyes from the blinding brilliance. Sweat ran from her like so many rivers, taking the oil with it so that she continually reached for the leather pouch of cream she carried and smeared her skin with it. She stooped low, dragging the ore with her, and found the rock-carved runnels down which the metal would run into the shallow moulds, grooves carved away from the fires where the mabion would cool into thin strips.
She flung the crystals of mabion ore onto the fires, and when she had emptied her sack she wrapped the cloak about her body, and huddled in it, watching with glazed and red-rimmed eyes as the fires turned green, then red, then black, burning at the rock, releasing the molten metal.
At once the Fires seemed to fade, then with a blast of heat and a sudden glare they restored themselves; Raven tensed, leaning forward at a crouch and watched where the rock grooves vanished below the Fires. A thin stream of brilliant yellow liquid appeared there, running towards her, so bright it nearly blinded her. The trickle became a river of molten metal, flooding down through the grooves and into the shallow moulds, where it bubbled and cooled and formed an orange crust.
The moulds filled and hardened. Raven stepped back as one overflowed. She watched the Eternal Fires, saw how the flow of metal ceased all at once, and how it gathered before her, leaving the runnels free of metal, as clean as they had been before.
Using iron tongs she wrested the strops of mabion from the ground, and exhausted and heat-fatigued, carried them back to the shelter of the anvil house.
There she sat awhile and stroked the cold plates of the magic metal, their edges forming strange shapes with the cooling, their surfaces rippling with patterns of lines and whorls as if already some craftsman etched the images of the Gods into the blade.
She fetched fire, using a bowl on a handle so long she could only just carry it. She pushed the bowl into the Eternal Fires and carried a fragment of them back to the forge, placing them in the brazier and blowing air through them with the bellows she had found there, ancient wooden things, newly repaired with pliable leather, the work of Q’Ithrig perhaps. The small fires glowed bright and now Raven began the lengthy task of beating out the sword as Korm had instructed her.
She beat out the plates until they were thin, then folded them one inside the other and beat them out again, heating them and hammering them, heating and hammering through one long period of work and into the next.
She trimmed the wide plate of metal that was forming, and continued to fold the strip across itself, hammering it solid as the Fires of the brazier fused and worked their magic on the metal itself.
At length she had a strip that was half a man’s height long, wider than a hand’s palm, thin at the edge and deep in the middle, and this was the basic shape of the sword. She slept then, well satisfied with what she had achieved so far.
The next day Parwya brought her food and water and Raven ate and drank like an animal, hardly noticing the Uthaan, who watched her some way from the forge.
Having eaten, Raven blasted air into the brazier fires until they roared, then she pushed the forming blade into their brilliant heat, drew it out when it glowed bright as the sun and beat the point to precision, then ran her hammer steadily hour after hour along the edge, watching the way patterns on and in the metal blade were changed with each blow, as if there were liquid inside the blade, shining through the surface. She forged an edge to the sword that was sufficient for her to sharpen with a whetstone, then she trimmed the hand-end and fashioned out a tang that would slit safely and tightly into a wooden haft.
Almost dropping from heat and exhaustion, she finally picked up the sword blade by its tang and held it above her head, feeling the swiftness and the lightness of it, smiling as she felt its power begin to infuse her.
Then she tempered the blade for the final times in the way Korm had told her, in water mixed with ash and her own blood, drawn from her left wrist by a single knife cut. Five times she heated the blade until it looked as if it would melt, five times she plunged it into the murky water held in a stone trough. Steam rose and choked her, and she was sure the blade would crack and fragment, but five times it came from the tempering as bright as when she plunged it in. And five times, as she raised the blade to peer at it, she felt the power increase, felt her skin tingle with excitement as she imaged the duel with Q’Ithrig.
The sixth time it was tempered was the last time, and Raven was glad of that, and glad when it was done…
The golden metal glowed even brighter as she withdrew it form the brazier, and held it in the powerful iron tongs. Her hands were wrapped in thick cloth and leather and when the edge of whiteness had gone from the blade she took the tang in both hands and turned swiftly to where Korm and Spellbinder held the screaming Ginnim, now naked and afraid. As she plunged the burning blade into his belly it hissed and sizzled and the skin of his body caught fire so that when she drew the blade from his corpse he fell forward and was swiftly consumed by flame. Parwya collected the man’s charred corpse later and dragged it to where the unburned body of the Ghost Lord lay.
On the final “day,” when all were exhausted with the monotony of the forge, Raven fixed the handle to the sword, a simple wooden thing with finger-grips carved crudely, then bound about with thin leather strips, nailed into place. She felt no need for a guard, nor for any decoration on the pommel. It was a strange-shaped weapon, but it was still a Mabion sword.
She returned the brazier fires to the great, glowing bound of the Eternal Fires, then she went back to the forge and took the sword out into the cavern.
At once, unexpectedly, a wind began to blow and the cavern dimmed, as if a torch were suddenly shielded behind the figure of a man, still casting light, but shadowed light.
Through this gloom she saw Parwya and Korm approaching steadily, almost stiffly. The Princess called out to her.
“You have done well, Raven. The cavern recognises the perfection of the blade, for it prepares to test you, and allow you the final working upon the blade.”
Raven wiped sweat from her blackened face and swished the Mabion sword about, feeling its strength and swiftness, enjoying the way it scythed the air as if it cut it. “I am ready for that,” she cried loudly. “With this bade I sense I am a match for anyone and anything.”
“Then fight well,” said the Uthaan, and the two of them were gone, vanished into the greyness as if they had not been there.
Raven stepped after them, searching for them, calling their names. Her voice echoed in the emptiness, to be drowned by the noisy blast of air gusting through the great Fires. Light glowed for a moment, then faded again, and the cool breeze ruffled her clothing, causing her to turn this way and that, searching for Spellbinder, searching for that which would test her.
In front of her, in the sheer wall of the cavern, she saw a rift, a great split in the rock that she had not noticed before. There was a noise within that chasm, and she moved towards the darkness, eyes wide and searching for danger.
He came running at her, a giant of a man dressed all in black, the shining black armour of a Weaponmaster; his hair hung lank and greasy about his shoulders, his eyes regarded Raven with a dull intensity, as if he looked at her but did not see her. His sword, wide-bladed, cut the air before his body like some animal feeling its way blind.
Raven’s heart surged and raced with fury, with excitement, with rememberance…
Of a time when this huge man, this Weaponmaster, had stripped her and raped her with a brutality she had not met since, not even in the perverse society of the Altanate…
Of a time when she had cut this man to death as her revenge, watching his body stumble, dead, onto the sands of a Karhsaam arena…
Of a time when he had appeared again, dead yet not dead, given life by the mage, Belthis, and used to distract her from her more important quest!
Karl ir Donwayne! Her tormentor…the darkness in her darkest dreams…the destroyer of her innocence…
She flew at him, her voice screeching the rage she felt, as if the mask that the unseen priests and Sorcerers of that Mystic Isle had put upon her was lifted, the coldness she felt towards this bestial man suddenly warmed, as it should have been.
“Will I never know the peace of your final death?” she cried, and the Mabion blade rang loud, rang strong, on Donwayne’s scimitar. He laughed, the laugh an endless song of abuse, making the blood surge through her head, making every muscle in her body tense with fury.
Twice more he parried her furious blows, and then his guard was lost and the Mabion blade swept through his skull, cutting him neatly above the eyes.
Raven stumbled caught unawares. She fell headlong on the cold rock of the cavern, the Mabion blade slipping from her fingers. Slowly she came to her senses, the pounding of head and heart calmed down, the rush of blood to her skin drained back into her deeper reaches. Abruptly she sat up, looked about. There was just a wind, and the distant glowing of the fires. There was no blood on her sword, no sign of Donwayne’s body.
“A trick!” she cried, a moment of despair, a moment of anger, a moment of confusion. “But to what end?”
Something darted from the rift in the rock, a dark shape slipping across the edge of her vision. She twisted about, then jumped to her feet, reaching for the blade where it lay next to her.
Even as her fingers closed on the wooden hilt she saw the figure rushing at her, black-cowled, with gleaming gold eyes shining from that shadow place where the man’s face was. Long boney fingers stretched towards her, the air charged and sparked, and a blue ribbon of light curled towards her.
“A sorcerer,” she murmured, instinctively dodging the magic fire. In her grip the Mabion blade had lifted and the blueness curled all about the gold, and faded. The Sorcerer raised his arms, and as he did so his cowl fell away from his face; drawn cheeks and a narrow, cruel mouth greeted Raven’s searching stare. The mouth stretched in a grin, then opened to emit a piercing laugh. The man’s yellow hair fell tight and curly to his neck and now that hair stood away from his scalp, a bizarre halo of fur; his eyes closed, the air before him was filled with spinning things, tiny winged shapes that darted and dodged, spinning through the air towards Raven. As they came, like silvery insects, she saw the wide, evil jaws, the glint of distant fire-light on metallic teeth.
The swarm of creatures buzzed about Raven, who slashed at them in hysterical fury, trying to see where to run to avoid their menacing jaws, the stinging bite of those cruel teeth. Then she noticed how the blade, almost without her willing it to, was smashing through the magic insects, sending them fragmented and broken in all directions. There seemed to be some fatal attraction for the flying things for the gleaming gold of the Mabion; they could not resist its lethal charm, and were smashed against it with mindless fury.
When it was done, and the ground was littered with the sparkling remains of her attackers, Raven turned back to face the Sorcerer. There was naught but a column of grey smoke where he had stood, an illusory fog that drifted upwards and dispersed.
Now at last she began to understand the full power of the sword. She laughed delightedly, waving the blade above her head and watching it flash in the Eternal light. She felt the strength of that sword in her own arm, reaching to the core of her. Her laughter turned to murmured words…
“I am all nigh invincible with this. Neither illusion, nor magic can combat me. By the Sons of the Mother, this makes me a match even for Kharwhan!” And she turned about, her gaze flickering across the shadow places in the cavern, her blue eyes alive with fire, her hair, still grimed with ash from the forge, flowing free about her body. “Do you hear me, Sorcerers? Do you hear the words of Raven, of Su’uan who you have pulled and pushed like a mule? No more shall I walk and run at your command; now we are equal. Now we do it my way, always! I am free with this blade, I am as free as my bird!”
And behind her came the angry roar of some mindless beast, and a blow was delivered to her head that nearly knocked her brains from her skull.
She sprawled on the ground, seeing visions of fire and falling stars, then scrabbled for the Mabion sword and twisted round to stare up at her attacker. Giant, it was, broad and tall, and shaggy with matted, stinking fur. Its muzzle was long and pointed, opened wide to show rows of inward-pointing teeth, a flexing tongue, all red raw meat, salivating ready for the consumption of its prey. Its great arms lifted, reaching to the woman; claws, curved and sharpened along the edge like Tirwand sabres, clacked and slashed at her. It shambled forward, roaring loud, and the sword in Raven’s hand danced upwards at her slightest effort of will, slashed at the leathery hide of the beast beneath the fur.
The blade parted its flesh like butter, yet still it lumbered towards her, its howls of hunger now cries of pain and hurt. Gleaming viscera poked through the rend in its belly, blood oozed into the matted hair. It struck at Raven, its claws narrowly missing her face, and she lifted the sword and watched it sever those evil horny weapons at the base. Then she drove her blade downwards, through the arm of the animal, saw the hand severed and the bright blood pulse towards her.
It came on. She savaged it and cut it open, drawing blood and inner organs until the thing seemed empty of anything but its muscles, stumbling and staggering through its own entrails, still trying to catch and kill the darting shape of the warrior that it wanted for its meal.
She stood her ground then, and as the beast would have toppled her she struck it below the jaw, watched the Mabion blade take off its head as a wooden sword knocks a pebble from a post.
Raven stepped across the gruesome corpse, watched the great rift in the cavern wall. “Eater of illusions. Guardian against magic, defender against the brutal…what else. I wonder…what else?”
Her old friend Argor stepped from the place in the wall, stood for a moment watching her, then drew his sword.
Dark he was, and tall, stripped to the waist as always, his body tensed for battle, his eyes gleaming and deceptive as they seemed to glance all about Raven, making her want to search behind her for some trick. He was just as she remembered him from the training days in Lyand and elsewhere, when he had shown her expertise with every weapon, and had taught her how to be a weapon herself.
“Argor!” she cried, her body limp with surprise and apprehension. “You are illusion too, say you are!”
“All magic is illusion, Raven,” sair Argor in his gravely, pleasant voice. “And a good warrior employs as much illusion in his fighting as a mage. The blade that strikes elsewhere than where the enemy expects, that is the blade that is blooded.”
And he ran at her, his sword sweeping up for the swift decapitating blow. Raven felt the sword twitch and twist in her hand, but she fought it down. She could not…she would not strike at Argor, her friend and tutor.
Instead she turned and ran, still wrestling the sword which was inclined in her defence. She twisted about, to call Argor to reason, half aware that she fought a shadow, that this was some trick of the cavern.
